On 8/27/24 11:06 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Simply having interests, or the courage of your convictions is immune
evasion, if I understand. The problem with news, social media and
many kinds of communication is that they risk decreasing social
entropy. People become too similar. People stop trying because they
feel pressured to conform or feel superseded and redundant.
Antidepressants to the rescue..
I have become rather enamored of Michael Levin's work, a recent talk he
gave emphasizing the depth (cellular up through multinational
organizations) and breadth (human across
mammal/vertebrate/multicellular/colony/single-cell/synthBio/organoids)
"apex" of self-organizing systems helps *ME* to think about the
well-made point you have here (having interests is immune evasion)....
I (want to?) believe that "enlightened self interest" can be expansive
enough to span these scale and exoticism spectra? Allow a more measured
"immune response" rather than the cytokine storms and anaphalaxis we
court all the time?
Must *I* storm the capitol if one (or several or many)
legislators-en-residence don't attend to my personal-petty preferences
(interests) well enough? Some say yes, but I think they just like
storming and tearing down any symbols of "governance" (except their own
rebel/nazi flags/armbands?). Must I occupy/capture a city block (or
more) and demand total eradication of the immune system (defund the
police) because in fact the immune system can be pretty damned
discriminating in it's also-indiscriminateness?
Re: antidepressants: If TV was the opiate of the masses, modern
streaming shite in it's myriad forms is the Meth (or Fentanyl or maybe
PCP?) of modern internet culture? I'm at least half-hooked... and on
a good day it makes me think I can fly! Or not.
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *steve smith
*Sent:* Tuesday, August 27, 2024 9:53 AM
*To:* friam@redfish.com
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] on government
No News == Good News
I'm inclined to agree with this. In my analogical/metaphorical style
I think of "News" as being something like "Inflammation" in an
organism or tissue. Inflammation has a role... to warn the organism
(or coupled systems) that something is out of "healthy operating range".
I was just listening to congress grilling the Project 2025 architect
and it felt *very much* like inflammation (as does most every
deliberation of every committee?). Is P2025 not in fact the
'publicans (or more apropos, MAGA) attempt to establish or move to
their idealized form of "governance"?
<off on a RANT>
Glen has referred to collective humanity as being more like a
slime mold than any other "superorganism" (correct me here because
I'm sure I am wrong) but I think we (collective humanity) are on
the verge of (years, decades?) new level of organization which
reflects the global scale of our reach and coupling along with
some sense that we have "tried a lot of forms of self-organizing"
through alternatively government (nation-states), religion (with
global reach), multi-national corporations (starting with Dutch
East India and Hudson Bay? ...) and the philosophical
underpinnings which inform (sorry Nick) and shape all of the former.
I see why many whose personal and in-group identity is aligned
with a specific religion/politic/branding/etc are
offended/threatened by anything "global" scale... to them it can
only feel like being over-run by "other" when in fact, they are
the "other" who has been doing lots of "over-running".
Renormalization and subsumption and merging (emergently) is very
scary and threatening stuff and maybe is indistinguishable from
being invaded by hostile powers?
Evolution is notoriously "inefficient" and even "brutal" by many
measures. I don't know (EricS might, others might?) know what
experiments in multi-cellular life and the emergent specialization
of the individual (cell) into tissue/organ types must have looked
like, but I"m guessing there were a lot more failed than
successful experiments? The flailing humanity has been doing in
this regard (for 5-15k years) seems like it has gone on forever
and has tried "damn near everything" but my suspicion is that
before information processing technology emerged
(Cuneiform/Gutenberg/Enlightment/Babbage/Telegraph/Enigma/Cybernetics/Iliac-Eniac-Maniac/IBM/Internet/Cray/TMI/Clusters/Mobiles/Clusters/IoTs/BlockChains/LLMs/Autonomous
Vehicles/?? we had hardly scratched the surface (or barely begun
to tangle our webs?).
We will either become a functional super-organism which is
copacetic with the existing biosphere/Gaia which is the substrate
from which our open-ended, wild-ass, radical-nonsense has emerged
or we will crash ourselves on top of it or perhaps crash it,
bringing our own selves down.
30-40 years ago I thought Climate Change and even Species Collapse
and Sweeping Environmental Disruption was a "Liberal Hoax" or at
least an indicator of our collective hubris... thinking we puny
little humans could crash a multi-billion year old planetary-scale
evolved complex system in (dynamic) homeostasis with nothing more
than a few thousand coal fired power plants and a few billion
internal combustion engines, etc. Now I'm pretty sure we've
already tipped a lot of systems with an inertial vector sure to
take us past some if not all of Rockstrom's Planetary
boundaries... and meanwhile most of us fiddle away, re-arranging
the seats of congress (or parliament) or maybe try to sneak some
extra supplies into a lifeboat (survivalist hoarders).
So do we die of an inflammatory/allergic/anaphalactic reaction to
our own bad behaviour or are we recapitulating what we call
"Cancer" in an organism but in the global
noosphere/politicsphere/technosphere/even-biosphere?
So much of our civilizational/political/economic/religious
development seems parallel to Cancer:
oncogenesis: socio-political-economic-religioius "experiments"
tumor-development: urban/industrial sprawl
metastasis: colonialism/missionary-work
angiogenesis: infrastructure development
genomic instability: techno-political-economic innovation
immune evasion: organized crime, cartels, terrorist networks
clonal evolution/epigenetic alterations: left to the reader
apoptosis evasion: Life extension tech/medicine/lifestyle
I started consuming news really for the first time maybe 8-10
years ago and I now live on a diet of Junk News (when I'm not
ranting here) and it keeps all my systems inflamed in the same way
a diet of Doritos, Mountain Dew, Alcohol, Tobacco, Methamphetamies
and Candy Bars might. Even the best the news-stream has to offer
feels like eating every meal from a fast-food drive through...
Maybe Tom J (and others) can help me think/feel better about
this... maybe prescribe a Paleo/Keto diet for the mind and soul?
I know people who claim to *only* consume long-form journalism,
seems wise. I at least don't let any social media in directly
(only the back-scatter off the mainstream Junk News?)...
I worry (suspect) sometimes that my posts are little more than an
an indiscrimanatory release (expression according to Nick?) of
cytokines. ...buh...
</endRANTforNow>
On 8/27/24 8:10 AM, glen wrote:
How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/
Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor
Covid-19 content
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content
What does it mean to "govern"? I frequently hear things like
"Democrats actually govern" in contrast to culture warring,
grifting, personal branding, etc. I mean, I welcomed Biden's very
boring tenure. I'm hoping Kamala is elected and that she'll be as
boring as Biden. If I don't hear from someone, it prolly means
they're working ... doing their job. No news is good news. But
even if Durov's arrest is solely about his complicity by
association with the app and his lack of governance of that as a
platform, I still kindasorta think the French prosecutor
(prosecutors?) is doing a good job of governing in assigning him
that agency, his share of the blame.
Sure, JD Vance is in Thiel's pocket. But most of our neoliberal
Democrats are also in the pockets of large corporations or rich
vampires. Can it be any other way? Can an American politician
*actually* govern? Or is it all smoke and mirrors?
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